Archive for the '22' tag

Top Of The Heap!

September 10th, 2008 — Business, E-Commerce, Featured, Search Engine Optimization

Well I’m pretty stoked… I just did a quick check of ’s results for the search motorcycle dealer e-commerce and lo and behold I’ve got two sites in the top 6 results of the ! The higher one is the site that I run day-to-day operations for, A&S BMW Motorcycles, and the second one is of course this site.

Now obviously is a fickle lover and a day, a week, or a month from now the same search could result in drastically different results. But for now I’m pretty happy that I’m at the top of the industry that I specialize in.

And now, for posterity’s sake, here’s a screen-grab of the in question:

Motorcycle E-Commerce Google Search Result Page

I’m so easy to make happy!  8-)

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How to choose an SEO Consultant : LinkedIn Answers Response

August 25th, 2008 — Business, E-Commerce, Resources, Search Engine Optimization

Here was the LinkedIn:Answers question:

Who is the BEST Consultant out there?

I am looking for the best consultant out there, to work with me on a content driven lead gen property we are working on.

This can be paid in Cash / Cash + Equity

This was my response:

There are some good recommendations here obviously, but I think it’s very important that you understand the scope of your question. I’m not trying to be pedantic, and if you already know this stuff then that’s great.

Fundamentally good (and to a large extent ) is based around having a good site to begin with. That all comes down to having good content.

From there all the rest of the “stuff” comes into play:
-On page factors
-Intrasite link structures
-quality links to your site from outside with good anchor text
-Properly managed server infrastructure with all the appropriate redirects (if necessary)
-Good site hygiene (lack of duplicate content, etc. etc.)

In addition to that basic fact, is VERY market dependent. If you are trying to compete in an area with highly sought after keywords, it’s a much harder row to hoe. If you are in a niche or long-tail market, it can be much easier. Obviously the nature of the market and the inherent difficulty of the effort in each will determine how “best” you need.

Keep that in mind when you get recommendations as well. Someone with a niche site could have used Person X and gotten great results, but that same person in a more competitive market could have failed miserably.

As you’re evaluating an consultant just be VERY careful of anyone that promises a certain result or rank. They can do all the “correct” work and it can still take a long time to see the results on your site.

That said, if you have the bank account to support it, the two heavy-hitters I’d look at are:

Bruce Clay (www.bruceclay.com)
Stephen Spencer (www.netconcepts.com)

Both of these guys/companies have a much more comprehensive outlook and toolset than a lone consultant can provide not to mention the years and years of man-hours of experience that they can bring to bare on your problem.

I don’t work for them, and I’m not paid to shill for them. I’ve just seen them talk numerous times at shows like Search Engine Strategies, Retailer, eTail, etc. and I’m always blown away by their presentations, and I’ve yet to meet a client of theirs that was not amazed with their results.

I write for and consult to the and market (www.radicalpowersports.com) which is a pretty niche space, so perhaps my outlook is different than say a large consumer goods space.

But I’d suggest starting with these top guys and if they don’t work for you, I’m sure they can point you a good, trusted company that would fit better for you.

Good luck, and my the gods smile on your efforts!

Links:

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Selling Online #22 : Search Engine Optimization : Part 3 : Finale

October 22nd, 2007 — DealerNews, E-Commerce, Search Engine Optimization

OK class, this marks the end of the series on (), as well as the end of my columns for 2007. First I talked about the what’s, last month the how’s, this month I’m going to finish up the stuff with a short list of some of the biggest how not to’s. And because even in three months I’ve only begun to be able to scratch the surface on , I’m going to provide some really good resource sites for you to dig into in the future.

First, as you will recall, when it comes to , content is king. That means that the content on your site needs to be readable by the search engine spiders. What this primarily points to is that you want to make sure that your text is actually text! That seems amazingly obvious right? Well, when I look around at a lot of dealer sites, I see quite a few sites where the text on a page is actually an image. Sure, by placing the text in an image it might look a little nicer, and you have infinite control over the formatting, but and the other search engines don’t see text, they just see a picture! You really, really don’t want to have any text as an image. And if you do have text in an image (for instance as a button, etc.) you want to make sure that you take advantage of the accessibility parameters I talked about last month like ALT and TITLE so that they mirror the graphical text in the image.

The other place where a lot of sites fail in terms of is using Flash. Flash is an interactive, rich-media technology developed by Macromedia that was recently acquired by Adobe. While Flash can have a great place in your Web toolbox (for instance the one place where most people are interacting with Flash is via YouTube’s video player which is distributed as a Flash asset) you should be very leery of developing an entire site in Flash. Currently most of the search engines don’t have any way to crawl into and index a Flash site so your results are going to be total crap.

If there are some real propeller-head types out there (especially if you are a Flash fanatic) you will no doubt be yelling into the magazine that it’s all libelist, anti-Flash propaganda and it’s entirely possible to develop a Flash site that is -worthy. I concede that you can develop a -friendly site in Flash by jumping though a lot of extra hoops, doing a lot of extra development work, and so on (for more on this topic, you can check out http://www.jehochman.com/articles/seo-friendly-flash.shtml). But why would you want to? Considering that most of the dealers I’ve interacted with over the past year or two barely have the resources to do at all, I just don’t see the point in making it even more work by using Flash extensively on your site. Besides, most of the cool Flash-like stuff can now be done with standard-compliant technologies like DHTML and CSS. I know that this is going to generate some nasty emails from “web developers” that seem to prey on the naivete of some in the dealer community by locking them into complete Flash-based sites. Oh well…

The final thing I’ll tell you to avoid, and I know I’ve stressed this before, is what’s called black-hat techniques. Don’t buy into webspam providers, or /Marketing firms that talk about setting up hundreds or thousands of dummy sites full of keyword-rich links that link to your site. You may see an amazing impact in your results or Page Rank in the short term, but you risk getting totally de-listed or even black-listed from the search engines for your troubles.

Stick with the tried and true real-world techniques that I’ve written about over the past few months and you should be on your way up the SERPs!

Finally, here’s a good list of related sites that will show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes:

  • www.searchenginewatch.com - I think this is the best place there is if you’re only going to pick one site
  • www.searchenginestrategies.com - Want to attend a conference where people that make their life (I honestly can’t imagine why you would when you could go to Indy instead and have a heck of a lot more fun)? This is the conference arm of SearchEngineWatch. It actually is a very useful thing to see if you have the time and resources.
  • www.mattcutts.com - Matt (an employee of ) is sort of the man on the mountain for types. He sort of cryptically hints at some of the deep, dark, inner workings of . Totally worth reading, as well as the comments of others in his blog.
  • www.seomoz.com - A great site for . You need to pay to be a member to some of the more advanced stuff, but it’s a place where all kinds of folks hang out.
  • www.seobook.com - The site for a pretty good book (obviously) as well as some pretty decent blog posts
  • www.seoroundtable.com - Great place to go for advice and a good launching point to other good forums

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Selling Online #21 : Search Engine Optimization : Part 2

October 1st, 2007 — DealerNews, E-Commerce, Search Engine Optimization

Last month I introduced some of the technical groundwork on the why’s and the what’s of (). This month I’m going to talk about some of the how’s.

As I have hopefully (and pedantically) beaten into your heads by now, when it comes to , content is king. The merchandising copy and product descriptions should not only sell the product to your customers, but it should be both keyword rich and relevant for your entire business. If you sell authentic Ducati apparel, when you mention a jacket make sure you call it a Ducati Riding Jacket. All of those keywords are very important. And make sure you use keywords that your customers would look for and use. While the OEM may use the term brake friction block, people are going to be looking for brake pads.

If you hope to achieve outstanding organic search results, it’s not just the words that humans are going to see that are important. Search engine robots also read and index every available bit of information on your site. Even though there is considerable debate about the relative importance of a lot of these various “non-human” bits of information, it is understood that they do have a positive impact if you use them right. So here are some tips that can help your above and beyond obvious textual information:

Name the images on your site with in mind:
If you have an image of an oil filter for a Ducati GT1000, don’t just keep the name off your camera (like DSC-2054.jpg) or call it something like oilfilter.jpg, give it a nice descriptive name like 444.4.003.2A_Ducati_GT1000_oil_filter.jpg. If someone does a web search for the part number, the brand, the bike model, etc. they all are supported by a search result that will highlight those keywords in the search engine results page ().

Use all of the “extra” HTML attributes that are available:
Modern HTML code is designed for what’s called “accessibility.” There is extra data that can be inserted into a page to help things like screen readers (programs that actually read everything on a site out loud using speech synthesis) for the blind. You can use these extra bits of data to incrementally help your search results (again, it’s debatable how much it helps, but it’s easy to do and it does seem to make a difference in real world use). Use the ALT (this is short for alternate, typically used to describe what the image is) attribute for image tags. In the above example of the oil filter, the image’s tag should have the ALT attribute set to something like Ducati Oil Filter For Ducati GT1000 - Part Number: 444.4.003.2A.

There is another attribute that most tags also posses, and that’s the TITLE attribute. An example would be using this in a link’s anchor tag to provide extra information about the link. So in your site’s navigation, or within editorial copy, you could have a link to Ducati Riding Apparel with a TITLE attribute set to Ducati Riding Apparel. This will not only provide a tool tip pop up when you mouse over it, but it may help with as well. Of the two (ALT and TITLE), TITLE attributes impact on placement is the most dubious, but it can’t hurt, and every little bit helps.

URL’s:
URL’s are another area of hot debate in the world. Most packages will create URL’s for your categories and products that look something like this: http://vroomvroommoto.com/product_detail.aspx?8675309 where 8675309 is the internal ID number of the product. This is totally sub-optimal for purposes. What you want is a URL that looks like this: http://vroomvroommoto.com/ducati_motorcycle_oil_filter.aspx. If your package does not support what’s known as re-writing URL’s there are several methods and tools that you can use to do it at the server level or by installing and using various add-ons.

Page Titles:
Page titles absolutely make a huge difference in page ranking. The first and most important thing is that the most important things needs to go first! The most important keywords need to be in the first 5 to 7 words in the title. Most companies will put their company name first, then the other stuff. That’s backwards, unless your company name also has the keywords you’re hoping to promote. Lets say that your company is Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works and you sell Ducati and Moto Guzzi. It would be pointless to have your page titles read Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works: Ducati and Moto Guzzi Motorcycles. Instead it should read Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel from Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works. Now you’re covering all the bases and getting all the important keywords at the front of the title.

Page titles on your product detail pages absolutely should display a comprehensive product description before anything else if you want the search engines to rank the stuff people are searching for at the product level on the search engines. In the oil filter example, the product detail page should read something like Ducati GT1000 Oil Filter: Part 444.4.003.2A - Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel, not Ducati & Moto Guzzi Motorcycles, Parts, Accessories, and Riding Apparel from Vroom Vroom Italian Moto Works : Ducati GT1000 Oil Filter: Part 444.4.003.2A. On the product page, the most important keywords are the ones that have to do with that product.

Some of this may have seemed kind of propeller-headish, and hopefully the web developer you are using is up on this stuff, but it’s still a good idea that you have at least some exposure to it so you can manage and verify.

Keep in mind that none of these techniques are a silver bullet, and these suggestions are by no means even close to exhaustive, but when combined with good site design and merchandising copy they can help you get higher up in the ’s.

Next month I’ll finish the series on a list of the big no-no’s to avoid at all costs if you want anyone to ever find your site via a search engine!

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Selling Online #20 : Search Engine Optimization : Part 1

September 3rd, 2007 — DealerNews, E-Commerce, Search Engine Optimization

Last month I wrote about the online advertising practice of paid search. As I alluded to in that , and that you may have found out if you have looked into it on your own, it can be a really expensive endeavor, and accurately measuring the success or the ROI of all that advertising spending can be a headache.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to get people to your site without having to spend all that money? The good news is that there is a way. It’s known as ().

You should have noticed that frequently during past columns (such as the design, development, and merchandising columns) I’ve already made mention of . The reason for doing that is because to do right, you need to design your site from the ground up with optimization in mind. The next series of columns will now go into the nuts and bolts of actually bringing all that stuff together.

Just like some of my other columns that deal with stuff that has a strong technical underpinning, it’s going to take more than one issue to get through it all because it’s important to understand the why’s of as well as the what’s because it’s the why’s that will most likely drive the how’s.

Just to get my bona fides out of the way; feel free to “BMW Motorcycle Parts” or “BMW Motorcycle Accessories” or even model specific stuff like “BMW R1150RT Parts.” That’s the site I run (A&S BMW Motorcycles) at the top. It’s been in the #1 position for 3 years running for just about every permutation of BMW Motorcycling related keywords you can throw at it, and if we’re not at the #1 position, we’re in the top 5. We’ve even been above the BMW corporate site for the search of “BMW Motorcycles” (BMW makes special effort now to see that doesn’t happen anymore!).

All of this is all so vitally important because when most people are looking for something online, they typically start at one of the major search engines like Google (the 800 pound gorilla), Yahoo, Ask, and so on. Each search engine has it’s own methods of “discovering” websites (typically known as spidering where an automated web surfing program called a robot just goes from page to page, indexes what it finds on that page and follows all the links that it finds to the next set of pages, over and over, and over again) and of sending back a series of pages ranking the return results (known as the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs) when you enter a search term.

When companies talk about how well their business does with regards to , they use a term called organic results. That term is used to separate how visible they are based on the pure search results vs. any type of paid search campaign that they may be running at the time, not if they use pesticides or keep their chickens in tiny cages. Everyone wants to have good organic results for the primary search terms that describe their business. Or more correctly, they want to rank at the top of the SERPs for the keywords that their customers are searching for. That can be a huge distinction when it comes down to the difference between just driving traffic to your site, and driving shoppers to your site.

One thing that you need to keep in mind as you launch your site is that even if you do a perfect job with your efforts, it is going to take a while for your stuff to show up at all, let alone near the top. New sites are hard to find. It’s going to take a while for the search engines to find you (all major search engines have a registration process where you can request yo have your site indexed), and even after you are indexed, you may end up spending several months in a type of limbo while you are deemed a worthy site and not just some fly-by-night scam site (this limbo in ’s case is called the Sandbox. This sandbox, unlike the one’s from your ill-spent youth, is not fun to be in).

Propeller-head alert!
From an informational standpoint the Holy Grail for the web would be something called the Semantic Web. This mythical beast would function in such a way that when an author creates a site, they could tag the site, a page on the site, or even a term on the page, in such a way that it removes all ambiguity related to what the content is about, and the search engines would not have to essentially guess how to index the site. It would add a layer of intelligence to all of the pure data out there and theoretically allow much better search engine results.

Unfortunately there’s a huge number of complete scammers out there that are more interested in pushing adult toys, Mexican Viagra, and naked pictures of Paris Hilton that would stop at nothing to cram as much semantic information that has nothing to do with the crap they are selling but would yield high search results just to get people to their site.

It’s primarily because of scammers that semantic information (you’ll hear terms like META data, keywords, descriptions, etc.) is virtually ignored today by all major search engines and they instead have to rely on keyword pattern matching, relevance ranking, as well as other more complicated algorithms that analyze intrasite as well as intersite link structures to determine at best worth, and at worst (and most typically) popularity. Yes that stuff sounds complex ( What do you think all those multiple PhD’s do all day at ?), but if you want to get your site on top and make bags of money you’re going to need to understand it.

Now that I’ve laid out the landscape a little bit so that you have some context, in the end, it all boils down to content! Content is king. And like your mother used to say, it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it that makes it really important. The next I’ll teach you how to speak in a language and syntax that the robots can understand. Domo arigato Mr. Roboto!

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